AN EXAMINATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND BRITISH MILITARY IDENTITY

Context/rationale
The British military have a complex relationship with human rights, both as a legal body and a cultural concept. Existing studies focus on the practical implications of the relationship between law and the military, often centering around the fears that absorbing human rights norms into the military sphere may undermine the effective conduct of operations. This study will provide new insights by considering human rights from a cultural perspective, to examine the impact on identity rather than strategy.

Aims
The core aim is to explore the meanings of human rights within British military identities. Realist conceptions of security tend to view human rights as subordinate to national security. This project is predicated on the assumption that security and rights are not separate, competing notions; the human rights agenda has become, be it desired or not, central to British military and national identity. By considering the dynamic between official approaches and the experiences of service personnel, the project aims to explore the complexities of human rights discourse. It will identify how the military reacts to the continuing evolution of human rights norms, and the implications of this for the institutional identity of the armed forces.

Research questions
1) How are human rights framed in the military's public documents?
2) How are human rights perceived within the British military?
3) What does the relationship between external/internal conceptions of human rights culture tell us about contemporary British military identity?
4) As the normative agenda of human rights evolves, what impact will this have upon the culture of the British military?
Scope/methods/design
Situating the project at the crossroads between literatures on human rights and military identity, a mixed-methods approach shall be adopted. How these agendas interact in official and informal discourses of human rights according to the available sources, in co-production with the partner organisation. Document analysis will be the primary means for analysing official attitudes, using coding software, such as NVIVO, to organise the material and to elicit the dominant themes. Following coding, these themes will be further examined in selected documents alongside wider academic literature and semi-structured interviews with former service personnel. The adoption of a more ethnographic approach, combining a review of the existing literature, participant interviews and document analysis, ensures that a holistic analysis of the study of human rights and military culture is thus conducted.